Loco Council, or an alternative idea of what it could be :)

[Yann]

Hello Teams,

Well, I guess a LoCo Council would be better than having Jono doing all the
locowork alone... But there has been another project in the mind of a couple
of locoteam contacts for quite a long time now, and maybe this is a right
time to share it with  you :)
This project is the result of a lot of different issues, problems
encountered, things some of us did not like too much (you won't probably
agree with all of them but here they are)

- Canonical hosting sucks. You have the choice between poor dedicated
servers or being in canonical's datacenter and stick to 3 or 4 apps.
- Canonical won't let you build a not-for-profit. Believe me or not, but at
some point in the growth of your loco, money will be needed. Ubuntu-fr and
Ubuntu-de managed to get a "LoCoTeam Agreement" 2 years ago, which allowed
us to use the name "Ubuntu-fr" and "Ubuntu-de" to start our organisations.
This was for us, I think juliux can  confirm this, a huge step forward. We
can now fund a powerful and reliable hosting solution, organise events with
more money involved, sponsor events with shirts, flyers, stickers,  .... and
buy some for other locos :)
- Some companies want to help Ubuntu and the loco project but don't want to
give money to a company. Some of them turned to Ubuntu-fr, willing to give
money, and asking us to use it not only for ubuntufr but also for other
locos - ubuntufr can do it, but technically speaking ubuntufr is more about
french speaking countries :)
- As canonical is a company, it works like a "blackbox". The Ubuntu
Foundation was announced two years ago because "It's important for us to
distinguish the philanthropic and non-commercial work that is at the heart
of the Ubuntu project, from the commercial support and certification
programs that are the focus of Canonical Ltd.", said Mark Shuttleworth.
Sadly, this never happened, and I got told over and over I misunderstood
what the foundation was about. I was at the linuxtag in germany in 2006, you
had a Canonical both called "Ubuntu" and a "Ubuntu Community" booth held by
the locos. Anyway, if people want to fund Ubuntu, how can they now if the
money the give to canonical is going to be used for ubuntu, or to help
improve the support company that canonical is? Nothing says that money given
to canonical will be used for Ubuntu development or Locoteam sponsorship.
- Ubuntu owns Ubuntu trademarks and copyrights, and therefore uses it to
build exclusivity contracts for mechandising, for example. Which in theory
would mean loco would not be able to do ubuntu-related merchandising. As it
is one of our primary income modes, I find this a bit sad. (to be confirmed,
though).
- It is hard to get Cds, it is hard to get these "event boxes". And nobody
knows who gets them and how this is decided - black box system. The only
thing we know is they are needed, and if canonical don't produce them
anymore, someone else has too... and if we have to do it ourselves, it is a
lot cheaper to produce a lot and then distribute among locos :)

Anyway, there are a couple of issues I am not too happy with (and from what
I heard some other people share some of my views). You won't probably agree
with all of these but, well,  I am speaking really only for myself here :)

In the end, what is this mail for? Well, Ubuntufr and Ubuntude have quite
some money now, and a hosting which is reliable, and being further improved
to accept more locos. In some time (let's say a couple of months) we will
probably buy *stuff* (stickers, flyers, posters, shirts, polos, banners,
[put here whatever you want, it all still need to be discussed], like  more
than we would need for our own locos, and find a way (logistic company?
someone with a lot of time? a company supporting ubuntu?) to get them
distributed among locos, along a yet-to-define process.

In a medium to far future we may ask canonical for the right to build
another not-for-profit organisation with ubuntu in its name to separate the
money dedicated to this project from the money belonging directly to
ubuntu-fr and ubuntu-de. If we don't get it, well, we may build a not for
profit without ubuntu in its name :( But with that kind of organisation,
companies who want to support ubuntu but don't want to give the money to
another company would finally have someone to give the money to. And
depending on how much money we get, who knows how many things we could do :)

So basically, this mail is to inform you that this project will be done
soon, and that you are all invited to participate :)  Ubuntufr and Ubuntude
can probably help your loco, but I believe the more locos would join the
project the more we could do. If at some point Canonical wants to join, or
if the Council wants to be part of the head of that project, I would be
really happy about this, as in fact I am just trying to push toward the
creation (and use) of that Ubuntu foundation and more transparency.

Locoteamly yours,

Yann
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/attachments/20070927/c15d229d/attachment.htm